Most individuals primarily experience the world through sight, and consequently, an overwhelming amount of information, entertainment, and communications are only conveyed visually. For example, most individuals experience the Internet primarily through sight by viewing web pages.
The prevalence of communication and information on the Internet has been a boon for almost every person with access to it. Unfortunately, individuals with visual impairments (e.g., those with difficulty seeing or complete blindness) are severely hampered in their ability to experience and interact with many common online features because the content on the Internet is almost entirely visual in nature. Thus, visually impaired individuals may be unable to experience much of what the Internet has to offer. While some webpages implement functionality to improve web-based experiences for the visually impaired, there is no current way to convey all of the content displayed even on those websites that accommodate the visually impaired.
This problem extends to the non-Internet world as well. For example, innumerable written documents, pictures and letters are created every day, and almost none of these items are perceptible or readable by the seeing impaired today. Accordingly, there is a need to translate visual media, either from the Internet or in the real world, into a form in which the visually impaired may experience.